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My secret wish for our independence

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Sometimes there is a place for things to be proud of. These are not just your new sandals, or your straightened hair-do. No, the things I talk about are the stuff inside you.

For you may not notice, that the changes you make internally flow like a river along the streets we live on. Yes there are sewerages in our inner selves and if we do not take time to clean out the mess, we conduct the business of foul smelling personalities all around the town. But own your choices, and make peace with your ability to make decisions.

Have you seen the lunatic man who walks in the middle of the road on school days? Well, I happened by him a few times and blessed his insensitivity on the busy traffic jam. What sad shower is missing him, I won’t ever know. But the twist of it is that, every homeless person in Samoa, has a home.

They go there to refresh themselves when they are bent from looking for the sign on a road that they are at home with, the road we all hide inside. Yes it is the road with an entrance sign to say, “ LOST.” And bread winner you, make a note. What we see but ignore does not go away in a flush.

So here is our lazy like paradise, of stoked heads and often more than not, some waist filled clothes. We sway like King Kong’s brown skinned children sometimes.

What have we done about the health of our people as a whole anyway? You know from the news that the can of pisupo is no longer safe. “Well, was it ever, may I ask you Govinda?” The name of a character in a book, I like to sound out in full lips and a yawning mouth.

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But this rag is lightly about the growth of our matured souls into our heroic independence. It sits on some grandfather’s lap, like my late beloved one, to stare into the eyes of our hopes; the hopes that when we made God our foundation, we did not promise him that we will own him too; the hope that when we grow up as flowers of paradise, our home will be like the sun, loving and fulfilling too.

Because I know the God I found in my darkest days, is for everyone. When I saw him again in my independent search from the broken road I was in, I found in a small corner of my life, a gentle God who loved me despite the things I tell myself; you know the stuff that we regret. If you have none, “rock on”, I tell you proud and with admiration and finesse.

But one must have deep emotion and great personality to also understand the need to escape from those heavy things. Poets write about the need to be stable in the guise of disharmony. And to do so, one must escape one’s own reality.

So I charge you dear paradise citizen to take a sennit weave and run from your coconut trees. Roll up your lavalava and dangle your feet over the empty rivers from your flowerless river banks.

Miss the colorful birds in the blue empty sky. Get angry at the whales that fill up our rocky beach. Stomp your feet loudly at the noise of bruised children on the streets. Find in there this empty life, and own the loneliness till you come out with freedom in your sky and notice the love in mine.

Seems if we do not react to anything, then we are passive, slow and dying. Something must be made to pinch us in the stomachs these days. If I tell you the story of a child who died in vain, would you cry? If I spoke in your ear, and told you that the things you sell from our land are not yours only, would you return my honesty with a lie? Are these brown eyes and these small feet I have, less equal to yours because I am a woman, a mother, and a child who wants to love in kind?

Once upon a time we were slaves to the powers of those who wanted to own us. Now we are slaves to the powers of our want to own things, that we should be free from or the things which do not belong to us anyway. We are children of the earth, connected to each other by divine things only. More than that is not possible.

We are going to rot here and leave our bodies sometime. When that time comes, take your pride with you and hang it on a tree. The wisdom of trees always tells you that our truest homes are forever inside! My only secret wish for our independence is that you and I will agree as country fellows to elegantly pave the gentle way there.